Inception: Dream or Reality?

When I saw last week’s HiveGhana engagement prompts, I was very confused which to choose between book revies and and reviewing a movie, until I eventually landed on talking about movies.

Then came the real difficulty. Something happens to you when you’ve seen so many movies. The idea of a favorite just vanishes in your mind because you see a new favorite everyday and it becomes difficult to choose. However, thinking long and hard on it, one movie surfaced my mind - Inception.

About the movie

Inception is a scifi movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio as Cob as a master in the art of inducing dreams and manipulating other people’s dreams to extract information that the person wouldn’t give out willingly if they were conscious. Something similar to editing your dream to whatever they want you to see.

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The job is to invade Fischer’s mind and plant an idea. The idea of dissolving his father’s company. Can you imagine that? Someone infiltrating your mind while you’re asleep, planting an idea in your head and when you wake up, you think you thought it yourself. Scary.

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But as you know, our minds are where we hide not just our deepest darkest secrets, but our most treasured possessions or assets. Because of that, some people who have a lot to lose if their minds were ever compromised have trained their subconscious minds to resist extractors.

Surprisingly, Fischer is one of the very few people with a subconscious defense. So his subconscious attacks them in the dream world. One scary thing is that you’d think if someone died in the dream world, they’d wake up, right? Wrong!

In the dream world, it’s your subconscious interacting there, so if anything happens to it like pain, you feel it too. So if it dies, your mind is lost or trapped in a limbo and you’ll be stuck in a coma.

My comments

The plot of the movie is very interesting and I like how they take their time to explain the concepts of the dream world. It sounded a bit like time travel to me.

Time moves faster in the dream world. So 10 minutes in the dreamworld is equivalent to 2 hours in the real world. That explains how they’re able to perform the extraction in 10-hour plain ride. And also why by the time Cob comes back for Saito in the dream world, Saito is already an old man.

The plot building is very progressive. If you think infiltrating someone’s dream and stealing and planting ideas in their head is cool, wait until I tell you that after entering your dream, they can induce another dream in your dream. It’s called a dream within a dream. That is eventually the technique they employ to successfully plant the idea in Fischer’s mind after his subconscious attacks and almost kills Saito.

I don’t like suspense, but I love the way the movie ends. If you hang out in the dream world too long, it becomes extremely difficult to tell reality from dream, and that’s the question they leave you wondering at the end of the movie. Whether Cob actually got out of the dream world or he’s still dreaming.

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You see, every extractor (that’s the name of people like Cob who perform extraction) has a totem or something like that they can use to tell whether they’re back to reality or still dreaming. Cob’s totem is something that spins. In the real world, if he spins it, it rotates until it comes to a stop. But if it’s in the dream world, it never stops rotating. At the end of the movie, he spins it to be sure that he’s not in a dream and the movie ends just before you can tell whether or not it stopped spinning. Is cob still dreaming or not? Watch the movie and talk to me in the comments:)

This movie is especially for you if you love SciFi and are looking for something different from the typical time travel or advanced machines, robot and AI type of SciFi.

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I originally wrote this for HiveGhana’s weekly engagement prompts last week, but never got to post it because I got busy and couldn’t meet the deadline. I don't want it to waste away in my drafts though so here ya go:)